A good place to begin when we think about helping the discouraged would be answering the question, “What is discouragement?” Let me try to address that from three different definitions.
What is discouragement? The word means to deprive of confidence or hope or spirit. It means to disheartened or to daunt. The Latin root means a lack of courage. You can see that if you just think about the word “discouragement.” The prefix “dis” negates the word that follows, so discouragement is a lack of courage. Another way of putting it—the way it was described by Howard Dial in a very helpful article in the Journal of Biblical Counseling some years ago—is that “discouragement is sin because it is a failure to live by faith.”
We’re all familiar with Romans 14:23, which teaches whatever is not from faith is sin. Dial declared discouragement is sin because it is a failure to live by faith. He went on to say, “It is an unwillingness to view one’s circumstances from the divine perspective. Basically then, discouragement is a sinful state of mind which fails to biblically adjust to disappointment. Its symptoms are those of depression, downness,
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